Friday, February 27, 2009

Eleventh Hour - Recap & Review - Electro

Eleventh Hour"Electro"

Original Air Date: Feb 29th, 2009

Nicola – Associate Staff Writernicola@thetwocentscorp.com

It is a dark and stormy night in western Massachusetts. Charlie, AKA that creepy guy that every office has to have, walks Denise outside to her car. As he’s backing away, a bolt of lightening hits him. Denise gets out of her car to see if he’s okay (he is) and gets hit herself. She’s not so okay.

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It is a dark and stormy night in western Massachusetts. Charlie, AKA that creepy guy that every office has to have, walks Denise outside to her car. As he’s backing away, a bolt of lightening hits him. Denise gets out of her car to see if he’s okay (he is) and gets hit herself. She’s not so okay.

Enter the Dream Team. Felix informs Rachel and Jacob at the local hospital that Denise wasn’t the only casualty – thirty people were killed by lightening in the area in a ten minute period. And the worst part is that another storm is coming. Jacob is determined to find out what suddenly made these people so attractive to electricity. They’re not the only ones – there were forty-five people electrocuted but only fifteen survived. There don’t seem to be any obvious differences between the living and dead victims.

Jacob and Rachel go to see one of the living victims, Charlie Wease. His wife, Rebecca, talks a bit to Jacob about how she had fallen out of touch with her husband, and he talks to her about acts of nature putting things in perspective. Charlie’s pretty out of it, so he’s not much use to Jacob at the moment.

Meanwhile, in the other half of our story, Elizabeth Hansen and Tom Lowenthaal are called to a meeting in front of their boss, Chase Coleman. He informs them that there have to be budget cuts and as they’re both working on micro-batteries, one of their projects is going to be cut. It’ll be Liz’s unless she gets it together before the end of the quarter.

And now a break from our regularly scheduled geeky science show for some strippers! At a local strip club, Dickie is getting a lap dance from a “shockingly” attractive woman. When he leaves he’s slightly intoxicated, so one can only surmise that it’s fate’s punishment that he should be electrocuted when he turns the key in his ignition. When Jacob arrives on the scene, he finds that his cell phone reception is worse near the body. What is it about these people? Their skin conducts electricity the way that wires would, which means is has more metal than usual in it. Jacob examines a skin sample under the microscope and discovers a thin wire mesh that seems to be growing. It’s taking metal from the surrounding skin and building with it. It’s a virus that passes through skin-on-skin contact. Time is running out to get to the bottom of this, Jacob. Another storm is coming in a few hours.

Back at the Wease household, Rebecca is shocking herself left and right. Her husband’s hair has gone gray as well. Jacob, Rachel, and Felix meet them at the hospital and reveal to the doctors that all the metal is being sapped from Charlie’s body, which is why his hair has gone gray. When they give him supplements the metal just continues to leach out. Also, when Rebecca touches Charlie’s life support machines, she shorts them out. Hood suggests to the doctors that they exfoliate the victims to get rid of the metal mesh.

Felix is given the assignment of checking into local companies. There are three in the area that are working with nanotechnology. He goes to test these companies’ employees and discovers that Wilcox Laboratories is the source of the virus. Jacob and Rachel talk to Mr. Coleman, and he has no idea how the virus could have passed to humans. He thinks that it’s possible that Liz sabotaged her own work to get back at him. However, Liz isn’t the culprit. She and Jacob examine the virus and find out that it’s gone from benign to deadly very quickly, and the only thing that could have done that is radiation. Felix adds another piece to the puzzle by revealing Tom’s sample to be an intermediate stage of the virus, not yet fatal. He is not affected by it, but he is likely to be the one who exposed the virus to radiation through an X-ray gun.

Rachel, Jacob, and Felix go looking through Tom and find him at the labs. He tries to run out in the storm but is electrocuted – bad luck considering he wasn’t even carrying the deadly form of the virus. Poetic justice is served, and the surviving victims continue to benefit from the deep-cleansing exfoliation treatment. Sounds like a spa to me!

Just when you think we’re going to go all X-Files-y and have some unexplained natural phenomenon, Jacob brings it all back to science. I like that because it makes it all the more real. But is anyone else tired of the formula to these episodes? Something bad and unusual happens. Jacob and Rachel investigate, look at things under microscopes, and wonder how such and such could get into so and so. Meanwhile, at some multi-million dollar corporation, someone is doing something they shouldn’t. I just wonder how this could be varied a bit. How about you guys?